Dr. Liebovitch has used complex systems, including fractals, chaos, and neural networks to study molecular, cellular, physiological and psychological systems. "I specialize in systems that have a lot of pieces that interact with each other,” he explains. Dr. Liebovitch is now the interim director of the Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences at Florida Atlantic University, where he also has appointments in the Departments of Psychology and Biomedical Science and the Center for Molecular Biology and Biotechnology. At the moment he is working on three projects that involve networks.

Despite the enjoyment he derives from applying his own skill and creativity to difficult and esoteric challenges, Dr. Liebovitch believes the most exciting expectation for complexity science is not specific research results, but changes in attitudes. “We have to deal with many complicated systems, and it may take a multidisciplinary approach to do it,” he says. “In biology, we have torn things apart and tried to study the dead parts. Using the methods of complexity we have to understand interactions. And we have to study things in their working environment, and we have to understand context. That’s the philosophical background.”

Dr. Liebovitch suggests that the biggest success for complexity would be if people begin to understand it so well that it no longer needs to be viewed as a separate entity. “People say there are no good examples of artificial intelligence any more, because as soon as some example works, it becomes part of the engineering culture and doesn’t count as AI any more,” he says by way of example. “Artificial neural nets are connected to phone systems, menus move you to somewhere else, it’s all become so common place it doesn’t seem like first line science any more. Once complexity becomes really well understood, it won’t seem so unusual any more.”

Sam Donovan is involved in many innovative projects in biology education with the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium, Student Biology Workbench, and Beagle Investigations Return with Darwinian Data (BIRDD). Currently, Dr. Donovan is the director of the BEDROCK initiative (Bioinformatics Education Dissemination: Reaching Out, Connecting and Knitting- together), a project to increase the use of bioinformatics in biology education. His current work focuses on tree thinking education.

Danny Edelson is director of the Geographic Data in Education (GEODE) Initiative at Northwestern University where he is Associate Professor of the Learning Sciences and Computer Science. Trained as a computer and cognitive scientist, Dr. Edelson develops and studies software and curricula that are informed by contemporary research on learning and motivation. The products of his research and development include My World GIS, a geographic information system designed for use in schools, and Investigations in Environmental Science, a high school environmental science course, and the Learning-for-Use curriculum design framework. His research has been published in the Journal of the Learning Sciences, the Journal of Research on Science Teaching, the Journal of Geoscience Education, and Science Teacher.

For decades, science educators have envisioned the use of computers in science classrooms that reflects the use of computers in scientific inquiry. To our great frustration, this vision always seems to be just out of our grasp. In our program of integrated research and development, we have been working to understand the challenges of reaching that vision and developing strategies to make it a reality. We have approached this work from the conjecture that there are two major challenges that we face. The first is the adaptation of computer-based inquiry tools for use in classrooms, and the second is the integration of these technologies into curricula in a way that makes them integral supports for inquiry and learning. In this talk, I will describe the approaches we've taken to adapting tools for visualizing and analyzing geographic data for classroom use and the strategies we have adopted for integrating them into inquiry-based curriculum units for middle and high school.

Robin splits her time between teaching in the Biology department of Beloit College, working with science education reformers with the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium, and coordinating efforts for Beloit College's new science building that is currently in the planning stages.

Chair of Beloit's Environmental Studies program, Dr. Grossman studies plant growth and development from the perspective of the carbon budget of growth. This research includes field studies on competition among plant organs for carbon, growth analysis and simulation modeling of plant growth. She is also interested in ecological function at the community, ecosystem and landscape levels. Her remote sensing research has focused on developing tools for obtaining information about the nitrogen content of vegetation. She also follows the development of genetically engineered plants and their use in agriculture.

Dr. Jungck has specialized in mathematical molecular evolution, history and philosophy of biology, and science education reform. In 1986, he co-founded the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium, a national consortium of college and university biology educators devoted to curricular reform across the nation. It promotes quantitative, open-ended problem solving, collaborative learning, peer review, research, and civic engagement/social responsibility.

Topics this workshop:

Image Analysis (macro and micro photography)

Biological Patterns through the Perspective of Artists,
Biologists, and Mathematicians

Danny Kaplan is Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Macalester College, in St. Paul, Minnesota. He has worked for two decades with the application of nonlinear dynamics to time series analysis, particularly cardiorespiratory signals. He is also extremely active in the development of new approaches to teaching mathematics and statistics to science undergraduates. He is the author of three books, "Understanding Nonlinear Dynamics" (with Leon Glass), "Resampling Statistics," and "Introduction to Scientific Computation and Programming."

Topics this workshop:

Multivariate statistical modeling from a geometrical and resampling perspective

Jeff Sale
San Diego State University
Education Center on Computational Science and Engineering

As Director of the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium at Beloit College, Ethel Stanley participates in a wide range of projects at the national level and presents on reform in undergraduate science education. She is exploring the use of case-based investigations as opportunities to develop lifelong problem posing, problem solving and persuasion skills. Past editor of the Bioscene: Journal of College Biology Teaching, she now serves as the current President of the ACUBE organization.

Dr. Rama Viswanathan, Professor of Chemistry and Computer Education, has been at Beloit College since 1983. His academic background is in theoretical and experimental physical chemistry and chemical physics. However, his full time appointment splits his teaching equally between physical chemistry courses including Molecular Visualization, Modeling, and Computational Chemistry, and computer science courses that include Networks and Computer Organization. He has presented at a number of BioQUEST/BEDROCK workshops during the past four years and was a co-session chair and invited speaker at the 12th International Conference on Computers in Chemical Research and Education, held in Pune, India in January, 1998. He was a co-recipient of Beloit College's Phee Boon Kang Award for Technology-Based Instruction in 2002. Significant computer-related research experience (both hardware and software) includes a post-doctoral fellowship in teh Owen Coon Laser Laboratory at Northwestern University (1980-1983), an appointment as a Visiting Scientist at the IBM Almaden-San Jose Research Laboratory in 1986, and most recently, a sabbatical with the BioQUEST/BEDROCK Consortium and successful completion of a Cold Spring Harbor intensive course in Computational Genomics in 2003. Rama is currently engaged in developing applications in computational visualization and modeling using an Excel front-end.

Margaret Waterman Southeast Missouri State University
Department of Biology, College of Science and Mathematics

Dr. Waterman, Professor of Biology at Southeast Missouri State University, is a specialist on case development and problem based learning and has extensive experience in faculty development as Director of Faculty Development at the University of Pittsburgh and as medical educator at Harvard. She has more than 20 publications in plant pathology and science education.

Dr. Yasukawa is past-president of the Animal Behavior Society, the co-author of two books: "Exploring Animal Behavior in Laboratory and Field: An Hypothesis-testing Approach to the Development, Causation, Function, and Evolution of Animal Behavior," and,"Polygyny and Sexual Selection in Red-Winged Blackbirds," and has served as Editor of several journals including the Journal of Field Ornithogy. He is a behavioral ecologist focusing research on the reproductive behavior and ecology of birds, especially the Red-winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus). He conducts field biology at the Newark Road Prairie, which is about 8 miles from the Beloit College campus.